


Susan WIlson

by cosplayermadness



Category: Original Work, Supernatural
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-14 05:43:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17502701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosplayermadness/pseuds/cosplayermadness
Summary: A companion piece to my work The Stages of Grief.I love Susan's character so much I thought I'd expand a little more on her since I've stalled at the 11th chapter. Spoilers for TSOG up till chapter 5/6





	Susan WIlson

Susan Wilson didn’t change her last name when she got married to the love of her life. In fact, after proposing to her, Nathan was the one who suggested he take on her last name instead. It was a bit of a shock to find out he wanted that, but then again, Susan was shocked that the mild mannered dork of an elementary school teacher wanted to be around her after all the monster hunts and gory ER days, and… her sister. She loved Diana, but her sister was a hot mess when Nathan had first come into her life. But Susan loved Nathan with all her heart, and if that was the one stipulation to being married, she agreed. 

They planned for a spring wedding, nothing extravagant, especially when they’d only anticipated twenty or so people. But then Nathan’s grandmother died and the couple decided they’d need to re-think some things financially to cover the funeral costs. It was then that Diana had enlisted in the army, not bothering to tell her sister until after she’d be deployed, and the couple decided to put the wedding on hold again lest Susan strangle the woman while decked out in white.

So they sat on their hands a few months, enjoying each other’s company, their little apartment cosy and well decorated, going out for bar trivia every week with her work friends, watching lacrosse games at the local high school his best friend coached. It was there own little world carved out just for them. A perfect little bubble of time.

The bubble burst on October 2nd, three years after they’d met. Nathan had been feeling run down the month before, not eating as much, sleeping fitfully if he managed to fall asleep at all. She’d come home after a grueling double shift to find him on the floor with shredded lettuce and broken taco shells on the kitchen tile, unconscious. The ride to the hospital took an eternity, her blood draining to her toes when the doctor told them his diagnosis. 

Nathan insisted they stay in their bubble. He didn’t want treatment, didn’t want to inconvenience his fiance. Susan couldn’t bear listen and she’d locked herself in their linen closet, calling Afghanistan on the landline. It took three tries before she’d gotten hold of her sister. Diana came home for a four day leave the next week. She’d spent the first full day on Susan and Nathan’s couch, Susan’s head in her big sister’s lap as they watched the Ghostbusters cartoon until she’d cried herself to sleep. Nathan had taken one look at her when he’d come home and decided that he wasn’t going to leave her. He wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He started his first chemo treatment the next day. 

Nathan made a bucket list, not because he thought he’d die, but because he wanted the experience to be less focused on the possibility of death, and more on the chance at living. So Susan said nothing but ‘which one first?’

They saved his sperm in a sperm bank, having a quicky in said bank right after. They entered in a pancake eating competition, a speed painting competition, and a three legged race. They lost each one, laughing hysterically after every one. They got matching tattoos behind their ears, Diana only finding out about it years later when Susan asked her to braid her hair when she couldn’t do it from a hand fracture. They also had sex… everywhere. Neither of them had been voyeurists before, but when you’re staring death in the face, you just don’t turn down the challenge of sneaking around in every library you can. 

One Monday morning in the dead of January, Nathan suggested they get married on Valentine’s Day. Susan argued that it was cheesy and she didn’t want to rush their marriage because of his cancer, that Nathan would look back on the photos and wished he’d waited until he had more of his hair. He disagreed. She didn’t know he knew he wasn’t going to make it through the summer. She agreed anyways and they got married in the hospital chapel, her nurse and doctor friends all coming together to put it all on. She didn’t wear a dress, couldn’t afford one, so she opted for her favourite - and only clean - white t-shirt, green scrub bottoms on, the tackiest veil her supervisor Linnette picked up for her at the nearest thrift shop. Nathan looked so handsome in his tailcoat and top hat ensemble, his hospital gown ignored as she kissed him when they said ‘I do’. In the end their wedding of 20 guests became 300 as every single person who worked in the hospital stopped by to wish them a happy marriage, Diana in an itchy polyester ‘80’s dress collecting cards of well wishes from people Susan had never met before. 

Their honeymoon lasted a week in a cheap motel in Arizona. They never left their room.

The day he died, Nathan told her that his only regrets in life were not asking her out sooner, not having kids with her, and not being able to grow old with her. She expected him to have more regrets, maybe the hunt in Bethesda that went poorly and he’d ended up bleeding into the dirt after the vamp bit him. But no, all he wanted was a life, a longer life, with her. 

Diana came home on the Monday, Nathan took his last breath that Tuesday, and on Thursday, Susan watched as Diana pulled the plug on their mother. She never felt so hollow. Not when their father died, not when their Abuela's mind started to go with dementia, not even when they buried uncle Julian. Nathan’s funeral was huge, hundreds of old students and fellow teachers coming to pay respects, the whole hospital sending cards to her, flowers and food too. They didn’t bother with a funeral for Penelope, though. Diana took her ashes and had them folded into a glass blown piece. ‘It’ll sit on a fireplace mantel one day,’ she’d said. ‘I promise, no more trailer. I’ll find us a place. One like we used to have before all this, I promise.’ Susan only held the glass orb that was once their mother, shovelling the leftover green bean casserole from Angela in accounting, dressed in Nathan’s old pajamas. 

Susan wanted to change her last name, she talked about it every week for the next year. She‘d think about hyphenating it, taking Nathan’s old last name on with her own. Danny, when he’d woken up from his coma, told her it wasn’t going to honour Nathan like she thought it would. ‘His parents were shit,’ he’d remind her each time she brought it up. ‘That’s why he lived with his grandma. It was an honour for him to take your last name. Don’t insult his memory by wiping that away.’ She stopped mentioning it. 

They met Sariah on a Friday, working the case on the compound run by a reverend with twenty six wives; Sariah being one of them, the victim being another. They salted and burned Louisa’s bones, the woman trying to kill some of the other sister wives for letting the reverend kill her. It left both Susan and Diana raw. She’d buried her husband not two years ago, and here was a man, healthy, with more wives than he could remember the names of, living it up after murdering an innocent brainwashed woman for having a baby girl instead of a boy. Diana had to hold her back from tearing the guy to shreds before the police showed up. She’d taken Sariah aside after he’d been arrested, the red and blue lights flashing over their faces, telling her that if she wanted out that they would help her. She’d agreed, and they got her high quality fakes of everything, her old name nothing but a pile of ash in her mouth. They took their new friend Lynn Doyle to a convent two states over at her request, hugging her goodbye and wishing her all the best. 

A year had gone by, the sisters still hunting in their old family trailer on days off, Diana’s knee now clicking every time it snowed. She couldn’t go back to the army, not after what happened to her, and Susan insisted she take up something else. Diana agreed, starting to take up coding classes when Susan was away at work. Susan pretended to not notice Diana sneaking around with senators, not bothering to ask why she had so much extra cash. She knew Diana didn’t want her to know so she turned a blind eye. They drank too much, Diana especially, but Susan was still wrought with grief and nursing the bottle some nights herself. She stopped on a Friday, on a hunt with so many ghosts in one house they thought they ought to just burn the whole thing to the ground when they saw Lynn again, stuck on the side of the road with her car broken down, dressed like she was on a hunt herself. Lynn helped them finish it, the house still standing when the day was through, and their friend now a permanent fixture to their sides.

Susan made fast friends with Lynn, drinking less and less as they formed a solid friendship. Lynn still had her faith despite it all, and it was great to have someone who believed in a heaven where Nathan and her family could rest after such a hard life. Diana didn’t believe in heaven. Didn’t believe in hope. Susan didn’t push. Lynn did. Lynn liked pushing Diana’s buttons, and Susan enjoyed watching them argue over petty things before laughing it off. She felt Lynn’s good heart rub off on her sister. She thought maybe there was some hope lingering in the older woman’s eyes there. She still slept in Nathan’s clothes. They didn’t smell like him anymore. 

Eileen Leahy was a firecracker of a woman, the epitome of the ‘fight me’ meme if Susan ever met one. They’d found her exorcising the demon they’d been hunting, unaffected by shrill ear piercing blaring of the old world war 2 alarm the damned thing had blasting in the canning factory they were trapped in. Her deafness saved them and Diana was so thrilled to meet another female hunter who had the same love of Nicole Kidman movies that she offered to buy drinks for the whole night. Eileen out drank her, Diana passing out by the time they got back to the trailer. Eileen made Susan promise not to tell Diana but she’d made the bartender serve her chilled shots of water after the third round as a way to mess with the oldest Wilson. Susan didn’t stop laughing the entire day.

They met an angel. A real, live, smarmy bastard of an angel. He helped the with a case, them needing a book, and he, a relic. Lynn grilled him about heaven, Diana about their mother. It made her heart fall to her ass when he told them that Penelope never spoke to angels, that she only had a mental illness, not a message from the divine. His vessel was older and Diana hated him, so Susan didn’t tell her sister when she’d slept with him. She continued sleeping with him over the course of that year, praying dirty thoughts to the french bastard, having him whisk her away to mansions and resorts. It wasn’t love, but she loved feeling wanted. She ended it after he stole a scroll from them. She told Lynn when it was over. They both kept it from Diana and Eileen. He left her a book on Enochian translations. 

The next three years saw the four of them going on hunts together, turning slowly into girls trips together. They got matching tattoos in New Orleans, drove jet skis in Lake Michigan, even did a salt water taffy crawl in Venice Beach. Lynn and Susan got matching BFF keychains at a rest stop, Eileen signing how much they looked like losers with them, Diana laughing along with her. Susan didn’t care. She was happy. 

Diana kept her promise of a house. After a hunt in Virginia that went far more smoothly than any other hunt they’d had in years, Diana took the four women to an abandoned church in Vienna. ‘This could be ours,’ she said, ‘if you want. I put in an offer, and it sucks for now, and it’s definitely haunted but it could be home. But only if everyone says yes.’ The only no that was heard that day was at Susan’s suggestion at a glass topped pool table for the dining room. They spent a year on and off fixing up the place, finally moving out of Susan’s old apartment on the other side of the country the day before halloween. She didn’t cry, but she did sit in the old apartment alone, the walls bare, just one last time, picturing the first kiss she shared with Nathan in the kitchen there. 

Lynn almost died on a Sunday. They’d been ambushed by a demon, capturing Lynn and knocking Eileen unconscious. When they’d found Lynn, she was cut everywhere, parts of her flesh gone completely. She was in a coma for sixteen days. Diana blamed Eileen, yelling at her best friend and losing her for almost a decade as she walked out the door without looking back. Diana started cutting again, drinking heavily, Susan thought she’d lose her family all over again. She refused. She threw Diana into AA, emailed Eileen every single week to apologise, and got Lynn into physical therapy once she was stable enough. Sometimes Eileen would message back, sometimes she wouldn’t. She ignored every single one of Diana’s attempts to contact her, their relationship shattered. Susan cried, wiped off her tears each morning and got to work. She’d survive it somehow. 

Diana and Lynn started to date, then started sharing a room. They were insufferable sometimes, far too loud as lovers, but far less annoying than when they had been making googly eyes at each other for years without doing anything about it all. Lynn still made time for Susan, and they’d look at old photos together, starting a Wilson family album of the four of them, even though Eileen wasn’t around anymore. Her room stayed how she left it. Diana changed the sheets every week. Lynn taught Susan some of her recipes and Susan taught Lynn how to handle a sawed off. Diana started a garden. 

Lynn’s first ever patient was a nightmare, and Susan took her out for drinks that night to help ease the pain of it all. They talked about everything until Lynn asked Susan why she didn’t date. It’d been seven years since Nathan passed, but he was the love of her life. She couldn’t bear to start again. Lynn reminded her she started over again herself, left her whole life behind for the promise of a better day, a less painful day. She asked Susan when she’d lost her hope for nice things. Susan didn’t have an answer. 

Diana refused to believe that the corpse before them was Eileen’s. Susan felt bile rise up in her throat, wondering why Eileen had stopped emailing her so many months ago, only to find her torn to shreds by hellhounds. Diana cursed the Men of Letters, vowing to string up each one by their throats, but still denying her best friend was dead. Susan took her to AA meetings every day for a month. She found herself in a bar twice, once almost taking on the bartender’s proposition for a roll in the hay. She denied him politely, telling him her friend had just been murdered, and he apologised, telling her the drinks were on him. She thought about drinking the entire bar. She decided not to. 

The Impala was the thing of legends, and seeing it there on the side of the abandoned canning factory was like a shock to the heart. She thought she’d hallucinated them at the diner and later at the bar, but there they were, chained up and bleeding, needing their help. Susan knew then why Diana kept them away from the Winchesters for so long - the boys were sloppy. Still, she needed Diana working, needed her to think about something other than their dead friend, and convinced her to not just dump them in the hospital or a random motel room. Convinced her they could use the contact. She was glad she did. 

Sam and Dean were good men, far as she could tell, though not healthy ones. Seeing Dean made her worried that he’d set Diana off the wagon, but was pleasantly surprised to see her sister take on the sober role of sponsor for the man. He was all harsh lines and grief and Susan saw the pain in his eyes she had in her own since Nathan died. Diana pushed his anger away to expose the root cause, the pain, addressing it and showing the man how to heal from it. She’d never been so proud of her sister before. She sensed pain and grief in Sam, but he wouldn’t say why, wouldn’t tell her of what happened to them, only that they’d lost people. Only that Dean wasn’t coping and now they had a nephilim to take care of. Susan felt for him, told him to text her and call if he ever needed anything. He’d text her on occasion, but he never told her much. 

The call from Germany came in on a lazy Sunday, Susan barely pressing the accept button before Noah started screaming in her ear that he’d found her. She cried, screaming for Diana to book them a flight, wedding plans for the two love birds on hold as they planned their trip. Eileen was bound and gagged in an abandoned hotel, used as a blood bag by several vampire families along with twenty three other women. Diana cried the entire time from when she’d seen Eileen’s unconscious face to the moment she fluttered open her eyes a day and a half later. Susan had her checked out and on the next flight as soon as they could get away with it, Eileen clinging to her the whole way home. She broke down in tears when she’d seen her room unchanged, unable to sleep without the other three women in the room with her. Diana and Lynn dragged their bed in, squished against the wall with no room to move, Eileen falling asleep to Finding Nemo as Lynn held her from one side and Susan on the other. Susan never felt such heart wrenching relief before. 

Eileen stayed with her at the house when Diana and Lynn went on their honeymoon, Susan telling her friend she was pregnant with a cupcake. Eileen squealed with her in excitement, the two spending the entire day planning how to tell the other two the news. Eileen told her she thought it’d be a girl, that she had an eighth sense about those things. Susan told her she had one too many senses, and Eileen stuck her tongue at her. Susan felt hope blossom next to her baby. 

Giving birth was a nightmare, she was sure she would die, but she had a guardian angel next to her even if her mother never did. Penelope Hope Wilson was born February 7th, five weeks too early and every bit as precious as she’d hoped. Susan cried, Dean rubbing at her back as Diana held one hand, Jack holding the other. She had a miracle in her hands and didn’t ever want to let go. 

The first time she laughed, Susan cried, thinking she’d never hear Nathan’s laugh ever again, shocked at how much Penelope sounded like him. She had hope and a family all her own, and no one was going to ever take that from her. 


End file.
